Neo-Con Times are Non-Sociological Times

This one is brute force.

Those who cut their eye-teeth on the likes of Austrian economics ten or fifteen years back have moved far beyond the analytical limits of the utilitarian framework and the facile solution to every social problem in terms of getting Big Government off our backs and leaving it to Smith’s invisible hand to automatically harmonize the private interests of individuals with the policy interests of the State and forge organic solidarities within and between Nations through the operation of the law of comparative advantage, while the State prudently limits itself to enforcing contracts and seeing to the military defense of the Nation. They are trying to perceive those aspects of life that lie outside the field of vision of the force-economics binocular- namely, Man’s specifically and irreducibly social being.  They have come to question the view of individuals as homogeneous, interchangeable, and isolate utility-maximizing machines endowed with rights derived from a fictive “state of Nature” in which all social relations are abstracted away as a methodological first principle, held to take shape only posterior to a putative “social contract” that binds the hitherto asocial individuals together, and only through the media of self-interested economic exchange and common subjection to the coercive power of positive law. In their rebellion against the poverty of these economic and juridical abstractions, they strive to piece together the concrete existence of the individual as a social animal compelled by its very Nature, and not just rewards and punishments, to seek out and affiliate with others….

Let’s contrast this inherently sociological current in politics to its nemesis. The latter strives to efface every aforementioned dimension of social belonging and personal identity and lump every individual into one big boundless mass, differentiated only in terms of technical specialization in the capitalist production process and by a proliferation of sexual and other “identities” shorn of their social substance and freely adopted and then discarded at will by consumers as though so many shifting vagaries of fashion. The social ties of shared descent, territory, memory, language, tradition, religion, and rule are progressively delegitimized by a relentless campaign of propaganda, homogenizing consumerist monoculture, and not least of all, coercive government action including military conquest (“regime change”). Meanwhile, asabiyyah is derided as so much ridiculously obsolete superstition, dull-witted provincialism, and mental pathology that stunts and “oppresses” the individual. Each particular society is progressively stripped of its boundary-maintaining capacity and slurred into the others- and since only particular societies exist, this means that society itself is becoming an endangered species.

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